Turbine Trends And Earth Mends
Speaking of Earth Day and its ‘green’ aspirations, and as follow-up to my late-2006 wind turbine print-and-online coverage (along with Margery’s more recent mentions), check out the recent discussion on Slashdot regarding home-based wind turbines. I particularly resonate with this bit:
Schwartz says that even with the economic benefits, it can take 20 years to pay back the installation cost. "This isn’t about people putting turbines in to lower their electric bills as much as it is about people voting with their dollars to help the environment in some small way," he said."
I have friends who recently installed a solar cell array at their home. They acknowledge that from a pure dollars-and-cents standpoint, particularly depending on how much and how fast you think the price of petroleum will rise ($4.09.9 on Sunday afternoon in Truckee, CA, by the way), what they did might not make fiscal sense. But when you consider the ancillary benefits (reduced health care costs, reduced reliance on the volatile Middle East, etc, etc, etc) their wisdom becomes clearer. This bigger-picture perspective is why, for example, I reacted so strongly to a post by one of my peers two months back.
Consider too, as I discussed with my friends, that as an upper-middle class (or upper class, depending on where you draw the line) family, their purchase now helps kickstart the volume cost learning trend that’ll eventually make the technology affordable to the masses. Current government subsidies on solar panel purchases have a similar technology turbo-charge effect. Both are examples of investment for the common good, acknowledging our interconnectedness and our shared use of this planet’s resources.
